A Minimally-biased Philosophy of Life: Crackpots

My collague at Ricoh, David Stork (also Professor at Stanford and author of several popular books), told amusing stories of the many crackpots who contacted him claiming to overthrow established dogma. He noted two consistent aspects to their correspondence. First, he said they always used an old-fashioned ("deprecated") communications protocols, like hand-written letters or manual typewriters. (I sympathize: new machines, like new languages, are harder to master the older you get). Second, he said the crackpots always "solve" one problem (say in relativity) by ignoring another but equally important one (say, in quantum mechanics). Stork neutralized the crackpots by pointing out their inconsistencies.

That critique is fair; deep inconstencies are fatal to a theory, and need be pointed out. Hopefully, the structure of this theory and its display makes it easy to search for inconsistencies.